An Email to remember.

As a theology student we are encouraged to seek as much help as possible from our professors.  Heck as a student...hmm, as a human being it seems we are encouraged to seek as much help as possible for our benefit.  For me, this came in the particular shape and form of an email.

I usually am not one to email professors, let alone speak to them outside of class because the moment I open my mouth is the moment my mind goes in a million fearful, self-aware directions, and I find what I really wanted to ask is no longer a reality.  It somehow vanishes like smoke and leaves me painfully dumbfounded.  So, thank God for secondary motivations.

I am currently working on a research paper regarding the ongoing "problem of evil" and upon reading an article given to me by one of my apologetics professors I was really into.  I found the topics of pain, suffering and evil being the allowed event for a greater good to be super fascinating.  I found the issues with that to be very personal and in my excitement I started writing my own notes that really  had nothing to do with the paper.  They were "songs" sung from the melody of my mind and the harmony of my heart.

To the point.  I ended up liking the article so much that I wondered what the writer of it looked like.  I knew he was a philosopher and professor, and it turns out the moment I looked him up his email was shown.  Without thinking I wrote him and upon receiving a response I immediately regretted the content I sent (which was a mumble jumble of my thoughts) to which he kindly referred to as my appetite for a partner in conversation.  Boy was he right, but I would probably never try to be that obvious about it with someone I thought would actually respond!  I thought it was more like writing to Santa Claus, but with a little more hopefulness. haha.

To the real point.  I got a response, and then I wrote back, trying to contain my serious excitement that someone I respect so much and who's writings have spurred such a song in me would be real and in conversation with me!  (Even more personal is that it came at such a time when I needed it most, needed some affirmation or something because I was pressed by every one of my circumstances to draw closer and closer to giving up--give up writing, give up the things I loved most for something more "practical").  This is a reminder to me of several things that I hope, one day when I look back at this entry, I will remember:  we are to encourage one another daily for you never know when the Lord is using your time on one particular day to rescue the drowning soul of another, even if someone you know nothing of, and secondly that genuine encouragement (because there is such a thing as fake encouragement) received is a most uplifting and life-giving embrace much firmer than arms or gifts.

So without more rambling, here is the email from Doc Wykstra to me of which I cherish as "an email to remember" even if I'm silly to do so.  Thank you.

JmeGrey

Hi “Without-Expectations Jamie”!

     Let me just say that you can shift into a quite remarkable and unique writing style—a writing style that, I surmise, comes more naturally to you (?).   !  Last night, having a little extra time on my hands, and it seeming like not so much work as play (and, it being the  Lord’s Day, my not wanting to work) I I spent some time musing upon those thoughts that you inimitably sought to express.

    It struck me that if you are beginning to almost feel at home in philosophy, it might help to get you some comments from me that might help you tweak your singular writing style just a little bit, so as to make it something you can use a a starting place for launching your philosophical writing.  Philosophical writing (in the Anglo-American tradition at least) is as you know on the dry dusty analytic side.  Your own writing, if one can judge by the most recent sample, seems to flow orthogonally to this, having the feel of almost a parable or incantation bubbling up almost supernaturally from some quite un-analytic part of the mind, like a song perhaps sung in tongues.  So I will just call them “songs” or “songs-in-tongues.”

    I have never encountered such writing before, but I find it quite beautiful, stirring, and with its own kind of promise.  The $64 million dollar question is: how, if it all, can you incorporate this into a philosophy paper? 

   I would suggest two things here.  First, that after letting such a little “song” flow forth, then “interpret it” for the reader.   I suggest you do this in two steps.  First, just copy and paste it the sung paragraph into a new paragraph, and try to tweak it just a little bit by adding or adjusting a few words or phrases here and there that will “establish continuity” between its parts, by using the “same idea, same term” rule and a few other tools.   Last night, I tried to do this for some of your more incantational paragraphs, as you will see below.  I have no idea if I was correctly discerning what you meant to be saying.  But if you read my “tweakings” you will know, and I hope you will also be able to see the sort of tweaking you could try to do, if you  want your songs-in-tongues to be just a little easier for the reader. 

   Second, go on to treat those songs (or songs-with-tweaks) as something to be included within the essay, but as “indented blocks” rather like I have begun to do in including “stories” in that essay I sent you.  (I could send you a version of that essay in Word, so you could just take over the paragraph-styles that I use: let me know if that would be helpful.

    Today I worked from 5 am to 8 am on a new essay I am writing which has a new story in it, the story of Polly Anne.  I added a new sentence, with a footnote thanking “Jamie at Talbot”, for a brand new thought that I got from reflecting on one particular part of your song-in-tongues. 

  Below, unedited, is what I wrote last night in response to your most recent startling email.   I interweave my advice and tweaks right into your own writing, using italics.  I hope nothing I say will sound dishonoring of your style.  It is so utterly unlike anything that I felt the best way to honor it was to give you my full “reader’s response” as I read it.  I have actually begun my “retirement” (or, as I prefer to put it, my permanent self-funded research sabbatical”) so have a little more freedom do invest my time and energy in things the Lord may bring to me that are ‘out of the ordinary’—as your “without expectations” email was.  I hope you enjoy and benefit from my own tweaked versions, because it is my best effort to give an interpretation of your songs-in-tongues.  And if I have totally misunderstood their meaning, I hope you will send me a tweaked-and-improved  version of my tweaked version.  

Warmly,

Doc Wykstra